


Upon The Dry Land

by Katherine



Category: The Giver - Lois Lowry
Genre: Gen, Jonah and the Whale, Post-Canon, Story of Jonah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 22:42:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13727517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: Jonas did not have the memories any longer. He was far from his community, far indeed from any of the communities that were part of Sameness. Yet here in Elsewhere (as he persisted in privately naming it) among these welcoming people, he received a different connection to the past. Stories.





	Upon The Dry Land

Jonas did not have the memories any longer. He was far from his community, far indeed from any of the communities that were part of Sameness. Yet here in Elsewhere (as he persisted in privately naming it) among these welcoming people, he received a different connection to the past.

Stories. Some of those were like sharing of dreams or of feelings, one person to a few people. Others were told to crowds. Still different stories Jonas found for himself, inside of books.

Gabe was still getting over his shyness. However, he liked to listen to a story one person told, and Jonas could observe him becoming more comfortable with the other children each time.

For himself, Jonas best liked finding stories inside unfamiliar books. He had once expected to learn that way with the Giver in what was then his home community.

He kept returning to the story of a man named Jonah. Perhaps how strongly he was drawn to it had to do with his own name. No two people in his carefully-ordered community would have been assigned names so similar as Jonas and Jonah.

The story put Jonah inside a whale. Such animals must have been different in whatever strange past or place the story was from. Jonas had seen a whale, and had the barest remembrance of that still. A wisp that was his own fading memory of a memory from the Giver. When Jonas had been curious about the ocean after receiving a memory of sailing a ship on one, the Giver had transmitted to him a memory of whales. They were huge, and patched in grey, and seemed peaceful.

Jonah's whale was a monster, a concept that Jonas had needed explained to him when he first found the story. The idea of being trapped inside was simpler. Jonas had himself been trapped inside a huge presence. He had been within the community, swallowed before his birth, before even being conceived. And it had been many times longer than days before he escaped. But here he was, he and Gabe, away from Sameness and safely landed.


End file.
